Read more about Exploring Office 2000  

What's New in Office 2000 

Take a look at your business. What are the tasks you need to do every day? Could you be making better use of the World Wide Web? Do you need to collaborate with people across time zones and borders, or in the next office? Would you like to create and maintain an intranet for your company, or create a newsletter for your customers?

Office 2000 has the tools that can help you work more efficiently and creatively. The articles brought together in this month's Office Update Focus point out some of the new ways to work with Office. Over the coming year, check out the monthly Office Update Focus for in-depth articles on common scenarios using Office 2000. Discover efficient ways to decide which Office tool to use for the job at hand, and take advantage of cool downloads and add-ins for use with Office 2000.

So What's New?

Here are some of the benefits of Office 2000:

• Easier to use and manage  Let Office take over routine tasks. Toolbars are configured as you work so that the commands you use most often are most prominent. Auto Features take care of more of the nitty-gritty details for you, and if you don't like any of the Auto Features, they are easily turned off. The Office Assistant now appears without a window, taking up less of your screen space, and can provide help when you ask questions using your own terminology. Send documents through mail simply by clicking a button in the program you are working in. An e-mail header pops up and your document becomes the message. Send it to anyone with Outlook® 2000 or another e-mail client that can read HTML. Office 2000 provides flexible installation options, allowing you to install on demand programs and components only when you need them. Office can detect and repair key files for you, and has a Removal Wizard that will help you remove unwanted files from older versions.
• Efficient information sharing and collaboration  Because Office 2000 uses HTML as a companion file format, you can easily share documents across the Web, even with users who don't have Office 2000 on their computers. Format your Web documents in Word 2000 as you would any documents. The ability to round-trip documents means that you can save a document in HTML and when you want to edit it, you can easily open it again in its native format. You can also share your information easily on the Web. You can publish and maintain live data on the Web in the form of worksheets, charts, and PivotTable® lists, or save a worksheet or database report to the Web. You can create Web pages, publish them easily, and have co-workers add comments to them using the new Web Discussion feature. Several people can work together on documents on the Web and comments and changes can be tracked.
• Support for multilingual users  Increased collaboration with co-workers in different countries, with corporations that have offices all over the world, and with business on the Web has created the need for a global solution from Office. Office 2000 has added new Office 2000 Multilanguage features and enhanced existing ones - allowing you to work with the language you want.
• Rich data analysis  With FrontPage® 2000, Access 2000, and Excel 2000, you can publish data as part of a Web page. Then, if you have Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 or later, you can manipulate the data directly in the browser! Office 2000 has enriched data analysis tools with the new Microsoft Office Web Components. You can now add Pivot Table Lists, Office Spreadsheets, and Office Charts to your documents on the Web.

Tips and Tricks, How-tos, New Looks

Look to this month's focus for a wealth of ideas on using the new features in Office 2000, as well as tips for using familiar Office features more productively. The Office 2000 Clipboard can now contain up to twelve items that you can paste individually or all at once. As soon as you open up PowerPoint® 2000 you'll notice that now you can view and edit your work in a Tri-pane view called Normal view. FrontPage, too, has a new integrated view that combines the FrontPage Editor and Explorer. While in WYSIWYG mode you can view your HTML tags in context, and you can easily insert formatting codes in HTML view by using toolbar buttons.

You can also read about new ways to incorporate data from different types of databases into PivotTable lists and find tips on working with many of the new features in Access.